Interference at KY Derby a Metaphor for Election

Lots of people are talking about the stunning results from Saturday’s Kentucky Derby. Of course, Donald Trump has tweeted his opinion, as well. I’m okay with that. There’s no reason he shouldn’t express his views. 

For the record, Trump believes the “best horse did NOT win” because “political correctness” influenced track officials to declare apparent winner Maximum Security (how could Trump not like a horse by that name?) interfered with other horses on the final turn (naturally, Trump would disagree with any suggestion interference affected the outcome of a race. He also took the time Sunday to opine that special counsel Robert Mueller should not testify before Congress. Obstruction, or as the Churchill Downs stewards called it, interference, was clearly evident in Trump’s post-election actions by anyone save sycophantic Republicans). Track judges stripped Maximum Security of the title and awarded the race to Country House who had finished second by about a length and a half. 

Let’s leave it to racing touts to work out the final results of the Kentucky Derby. I’m more interested in handicapping the 2020 presidential race.

First, a short review of 2016. Trump lost the popular vote but won the presidency by securing 304 Electoral College votes; 270 being the threshold required to win. Despite more voters preferring Hillary Clinton, she captured just 227 Electoral College votes. 

Conventional wisdom has it that Hillary lost the election by not attracting a combined 80,000 more votes in Michigan (16 EC votes), Pennsylvania (20 EC votes) and Wisconsin (10 EC votes). That would have given her 273 Electoral College votes, a slight but sufficient margin of victory.

By my calculations, the 2020 race will be determined by more than just the outcomes in those three states. Indeed, the field of battleground states is 12, divided equally between states Trump won and those that polled Democratic in 2016.

Trump starts out with a lock on 195 EC votes from states across the South and the middle of the country. He needs 75 more to win reelection. But 106 of his remaining 109 EC votes in 2016 can be considered in play. 

He won Florida’s 29 EC votes by (round numbers) 100,000; Michigan by 13,000; Pennsylvania by 44,000; Wisconsin by 20,000; North Carolina (15 EC votes) by 170,000; and Georgia (16 EC votes) by 200,000. Given the razor thin Republican gubernatorial victories in Florida and Georgia in 2018, it is conceivable Democrats could flip those states in 2020. Dems won governors’ seats in Wisconsin and Michigan in 2018 after flipping North Carolina in 2016. They retained the governorship in Pennsylvania in 2018. 

For the Democratic standard bearer the challenge begins with a lower sure-win number. He or she can expect 182 Electoral College votes mostly garnered from Northeast and West Coast states, 88 fewer than the needed 270. 

In 2016 Hillary Clinton amassed 227 EC votes. But 44 of those nods could turn to Trump in the following states: Clinton won Colorado (9 EC votes) by 120,000 votes; Minnesota (10 EC votes) by 40,000; Virginia (13 EC votes) by 200,000; Maine (2 EC votes) by 20,000; New Hampshire (4 EC votes) by 3,000; and Nevada (6 EC votes) by 27,000. 

What the numbers tell us is that it is waaaaay too early to provide meaningful predictions on who will emerge successful. It’s rather like the recent National Football League draft of college players. Experts try to rank the potential of players, but nothing is certain. For every “sure thing” top draft choice there’s a bust. Considered by many the best quarterback ever, Tom Brady was not drafted until the sixth round, almost as an afterthought. 

Your choices are to tune out political pablum and prognostications for the next 18 months or sit back and enjoy (Is that the right word?) the race, without, hopefully, any interference. 

Bookending New Orleans

Pigskin Bookends: The National Football League season started off its first weekend last summer with a controversial non-call of offensive pass interference in the end zone and ended Sunday night with a controversial non-call of defensive pass interference in the end zone. The first non-call cost the Green Bay Packers a win against the Seattle Seahawks. Replacement refs failed to make the call. The season-ending non-call came in the Super Bowl by the regular refs and cost the San Francisco 49ers a chance to cap an extraordinary comeback effort to go ahead of the Baltimore Ravens. 

How fitting that the start and end of the professional football season should be bracketed by similar controversy. In the opening week game a Green Bay defender was clearly pushed out of the way by a Seahawk who caught a Hail Mary last play pass into the end zone. No foul was called. In the Super Bowl, 49er end Michael Crabtree was clearly held by a Raven defender by his jersey in the end zone, yards beyond the five yards from scrimmage where contact is permitted. Crabtree was impeded. He couldn't catch the pass. No foul was called. Instead of getting four more tries from the one yard line to score the go-ahead touchdown, after trailing at one point during the third quarter by 22 points, San Francisco turned the ball over to Baltimore to run out the clock and secure the championship.

I have no allegiance to either team, and there are those who believe there was no foul in the end zone. I’m not one of them. San Francisco should have had more chances to score. If the 49ers had scored, they would have fulfilled my prognostication about a late touchdown to take the lead and we’d have seen if I was further correct in predicting a Hail Mary pass by Joe Flacco. Well, we’ll never know, thanks to the refs. But I did get right Baltimore’s early domination, San Francisco’s comeback, a fumble by Baltimore and the point total, 31, achieved by San Francisco. 

A Taste of New Orleans: I’ve been to New Orleans about eight to 10 times, always as part of a convention either sponsored by the publication I worked for or the retail industry. Gilda joined me during my first trip there, in the fall of 1977, when I was a field editor for Nation’s Restaurant News. While I worked the conference we produced, MUFSO (Multi-Unit Food Service Operators), Gilda partook of the spouse’s program, visiting a plantation outside the city, riding on a streetcar, viewing Mardi Gras floats in their garage, and eating in some fine restaurants. In Commander’s Palace, a  distinguished establishment, the spouses were served turbot, at the time the “in” fish, much like Chilean Bass has become in recent years. Gilda still recalls how one woman, married to a McDonald’s franchisee, disdained the turbot, saying she never eats any fish except the fish filet sandwich at her husband’s fast food units. It was that type of crowd.

Anyway, about a week before our trip to New Orleans, the restaurant critic of The NY Times, Mimi Sheraton, wrote a review of the food scene in the Crescent City. She found it wanting, except, she noted, for an out-of-town humble shack called Mosca’s where she had the most divine fried oysters, garlic chicken and barbecue shrimp, all cooked Creole Italian style.

Naturally, we decided to go there, cautioned by Mimi’s article that no reservations were taken and that the last guests must arrive by 9 pm. Along with a fellow editor, Connie, and her husband, Bill, we left plenty of time to taxi from the Fairmont Hotel in downtown New Orleans down Highway 90 to Avondale, almost 20 miles away. Though the cabbie claimed to know how to get there, it quickly became evident he did not. We kept double-backing and crisscrossing roadways, looking for Mosca’s. This was way before cell phones; there weren’t any public pay phones along the dark roads we rambled on. We were four hungry and squished adults sitting in the back of a Mercury Marquis (the unofficial New Orleans taxi model). Since I had recommended Mosca’s, my seatmates were getting quite upset with me. 

Finally, at 9:05, we came upon two whitewashed buildings supporting a backlit Budweiser sign. Lots of cars out front, on the grass. We begged entry, explaining the taxi driver couldn’t find Mosca’s. They took pity on us, but advised it would be an hour and a half before we’d be seated. We could stand at the bar. Gilda, Connie and Bill were not happy, even with $1 drinks, 25 cents for sodas (remember, this was Louisiana, 1977). We waited just 45 minutes to be seated, a few tables away from where Momma Mosca sat watching over her customers. We ordered the recommended dishes. They were more than divine. They melted away Gilda, Connie and Bill’s collective anger. It was, we all agreed, one of the best meals we ever ate. 

The power of a good meal to smooth over differences was not lost on me. Several years later, as editor of Chain Store Age, we ran a long article about problems at Sears, Roebuck & Co. Upset, the CEO of Sears dispatched the head of the public relations department from Chicago to express corporate displeasure. I took him and his assistant to Shun Lee Palace on East 55th Street, down the block from our office. Considered by some to proffer the best Chinese food in the city, Shun Lee melted away any semblance of protest from my Windy City visitors. They so thoroughly enjoyed the meal that we ordered a second round of each dish. For such an honor, the chef emerged from the kitchen to personally bow his respect. 

Passing Hail Mary

With the clock ticking down the final seconds of a close game, a trailing football team often resorts to a last-ditch scoring effort. The quarterback fades back and lofts toward the end zone a long, arcing “Hail Mary” pass, so named because it will take an answered prayer to succeed in overturning a seemingly inevitable loss.

With his address to the nation in front of a joint session of Congress Thursday night, Barack Obama is about to launch a Hail Mary pass, aptly timed to coincide with the opening night of the new National Football League season after a spring and half-summer of labor-management unrest and ultimate compromise.

Unlike the owners and players who worked out a deal to get the games going again, there is no realistic partner to work with Obama. Despite vague language from some Republicans about the need to stimulate the economy to jumpstart more hirings, anyone who believes the president and the GOP/Tea Party will reach a fair, equitable and non-acrimonious settlement also believes the Cincinnati Bengals will hoist the Lombardi Trophy at the conclusion of the next Super Bowl.

Obama’s ratings are lower than a quarterback who throws more interceptions than completions, who fumbles the snap before he can hand off to a running back. Even a rookie presidential candidate, the nationally untested governor of Texas, Rick Perry, beats Obama in a head to head contest, 44% to 41%, according to a new Rasmussen poll.

The president’s Thursday night speech will define his intentions over the next 14 months. He will either involuntarily concede his impotence by tossing out an often repeated and unaccepted pitch for bi-partisan compromise, or he will morph into a chief executive with backbone by staking out an irreversible battle plan to rekindle the passion of those who supported him in 2008.

He has shown an inability to connect with Republicans. So why bother extending an olive branch. They’d only reject it. How often must he be humiliated? When push comes to shove, they’ll corner Obama and the Democrats into accepting their cuts, their budget, on their terms, which means no tax increases for the wealthy, continued loopholes for the rich and corporations, no viable plan to energize job growth except by reducing or eliminating consumer and environmental protections.

If Obama recognizes, at long last, the GOP prevent defense, he can perhaps salvage his re-election drive by forcefully decoding the X’s and O’s that differentiate the Republican agenda from his own. He shouldn’t be afraid to use tables, charts and graphs (a la Ross Perot and even Michele Bachmann) to illustrate how under Republican stewardship the nation’s working and middle classes suffered while the rich benefited, and how more of the same could be expected should they succeed in the next election.

Don’t think for a moment a measured tone in the well of the Congress will accrue civility and points from the opposition. Obama can and must use this forum to get the attention of Congress and the American people that he intends to fight for the welfare of the country as a whole, not for an elite, special interest minority.

He needs to convincingly detail how supporting GM and Chrysler when they were bankrupt saved the American automobile industry, how millions of jobs were saved, from the small shop that supplies new car mats to the huge plant that makes car batteries. He needs to push for jobs to rebuild infrastructure, for teachers to educate future generations.

Republicans already label him a deficit spender. He needs to reassuringly explain why short term debt is necessary to rebuild an economy shattered by two wars started by a Republican president, by that president’s profligate Medicare drug reimbursement plan, by that president’s eight year reign of terror on government oversight of the financial markets that led to the current woes on Wall Street and around the world.

Does he have it in him? Does he have the arm to reach the end zone? Hail Mary passes seldom work, but when they do they can be a game changer, turning a loser into a winner. Obama has nothing to lose by playing offense. Indeed, it’s his only hope of reaching the end zone—securing four more years in a residence paid for by The American taxpayer.

Rich People Scrimmage

In the labor dispute between millionaires and billionaires, otherwise known as the scrimmage between professional football players and the National Football League over who will win the right to be richer, it’s hard for some to figure out where to place one’s sympathies.

It might help to keep several points in mind:

To my knowledge, no owner has a physical limitation on how many years he or she can possess a team. Nor has any owner ever risked his livelihood every time he steps out onto the playing field. Players, on the other hand, are like Roman gladiators—sooner, more often than later, their careers on the gridiron (and earnings power) come to an ignoble end.

To my knowledge, no owner ever suffered lifelong chronic body pain from their association with football. No owner ever experienced dementia, or became suicidal, because of repeated hits to the head.

To my knowledge, no owner has ever been dropped by his team because he didn't produce a winning season.

To my knowledge, no player ever uprooted (or threatened to uproot) a team from one city because another municipality promised him the world.

To be sure, players are not saints (even if they play for New Orleans). They can be abusive. Infantile. Spoiled. Selfish. Demented. Petty. Perverted. Predatory. Stupid. Plus more negative traits than I care to list. But they are the “show.” They are the reason fans pack stadiums, gather at bars and make TV ratings soar every weekend.

Owners treat them like interchangeable parts. In many cases they are (even Tom Brady was competently replaced two years ago after he was injured), so there’s all the more reason for the players to try to squeeze out as large a pay and benefit package as they can during their careers.

In a previous blog I related my outlook is generally pro-union. I see no reason to shift that position when it comes to football.

Parental Reflections

Millions of Africans and Southeast Asians believe the Buffalo Bills are one of the most successful National Football League teams in history. How could they not think so, when they are clothed in T-shirts from 1991, 1992, 1993 and 1994 proclaiming the Bills Super Bowl champions of those respective years?

Of course, Buffalo lost the penultimate game in each of those years, but by a long-standing practice of the novelty souvenir business, manufacturers produce “winning” merchandise for both teams prior to each championship game. To the victors go the spoils, the saying goes, meaning merchandise with the winning team’s logos sells like hotcakes. Meanwhile, merchandise proclaiming the losing team as champion quickly is bundled up and shipped overseas for distribution by charity and relief organizations.

I bring this to your attention because of the dominance of news reports these last few days about the sell-through of NY Jets merchandise at New York area sporting goods shops. It seems retailers couldn’t get enough green and white jerseys in the run-up to this evening’s American Football Conference title game against the Pittsburgh Steelers.

Thirty years ago my father got caught up in the frenzy of sports memorabilia. Football was never part of his Americanization. He could barely master the intricacies of baseball. But, as my brother Bernie recalled, in late December 1979, Dad, an independent apparel manufacturer, surprised him by saying he was rooting for Philadelphia to win its next game. Bernie asked if he knew whether the team was playing football, basketball or hockey. “I don’t know, or care,” he replied. “I only know that if Philadelphia wins and plays next week, then I have an order for 10,000 green T-shirts with white sleeves!”

It was the Philadelphia Eagles football team. They played the Tampa Bay Buccaneers in a divisional playoff game. Philadelphia lost, 24-17. More importantly for Jets fans, the eventual winner of the Super Bowl that season was the Pittsburgh Steelers!


Zsa Zsa Gabor is back home after having her right leg amputated on January 14. For those not familiar with the 93-year-old Hungarian-born celebrity, Zsa Zsa and her sisters Magda and Eva, along with her mother Jolie, were the Kardashians of the post-World War II era. Zsa Zsa was an actress of questionable talent, but she and the other Gabors were always in the gossip pages—Zsa Zsa, alone, has had nine husbands. Eva wound up outshining her in front of the cameras when she starred with Eddie Albert in the CBS situation comedy Green Acres in the late 1960s.

Zsa Zsa Gabor makes me think of my mother. Like Zsa Zsa, she was born in Easter Europe in 1917. Like Zsa Zsa, my mother had her lower leg amputated. Already frail from smoking too much and diabetic, Mom’s life became even more sedentary. My parents had to give up their homes in Brooklyn and Miami Beach as they weren’t wheelchair compatible. They moved into an independent care facility near Bernie, in Rockville, MD.

As her blood circulation deteriorated even more, she was scheduled for an operation to amputate her other leg when she died of a heart attack. One week from tonight I’ll light a memorial candle to commemorate her passing in 1996.